Fueled by angst, 'Addams Family' 3.0

How a superstar team lost its way in Chicago and New York, and now hope the third time is a charm

December 19, 2011|Chris Jones | Theater critic

NEW YORK — It's pushing midnight at Angus McIndoe, a Broadway watering hole. Marshall Brickman — who co-wrote "Sleeper," "Annie Hall" and "Manhattan" with Woody Allen — is sitting at a table in the back. Rick Elice, who penned the book for "Jersey Boys" with Brickman along with writing countless other shows, is there, too, sipping a martini. The mood is intense and emotional.

But the humor is typically caustic. The topic under discussion this December Friday night is what went wrong with a musical called "The Addams Family," which opened in Chicago in 2009 to mixed but constructive reviews, suffered from a plethora of subsequent creative trauma — including the post-Chicago replacement of original director Phelim McDermott with Broadway veteran Jerry Zaks — and, despite the work between Chicago and New York, was met on Broadway by, mostly, critical contempt.

More specifically at this moment, the topic is a giant squid that ate a musical.

First in Chicago and then on Broadway, the climax of “The Addams Family” revolves around a conservative Ohioan named Mal Beineke who, to the delight of Morticia and Gomez Addams, comes around to a live-and-let-live liberality with the help of the sensual ministrations of a puppet version of a giant cephalopod. For many, the notorious squid-sex scene became a symbol of a show that had lost its way, and forgotten whose names were on the marquee.

Brickman and Elice, it becomes clear at the kind of hour when one might as well speak the truth, do not disagree. “That squid,” says Brickman, eyes sparking a little, even as he grits his teeth, “is now working for Disney on Ice.”

This is a very unusual conversation, not least because that show-munching squid still does eight shows a week on Broadway, through Dec. 31. So is the similarly charged conversation the next morning in the cafe of the Hotel Edison — another Broadway canteen, this one of the old school — when director Zaks, seated at his regular table inside the so-called Polish Tearoom, could be heard telling composer Andrew Lippa and the producer, Chicago-based Stuart Oken, about his recent shuffle off to Buffalo to “change a few scenes” and keep working on a show that he was not even originally slated to direct. Lippa is clearly very interested in what Zaks is saying about all those last “D-minus choices crying out for attention” — not least because those audiences in Buffalo were hearing five new songs for “The Addams Family” that the final audiences in New York City this holiday season won't be hearing at all.

The story of “The Addams Family” was supposed to be written already — Act 1 in Chicago in 2009, Act 2 in New York in 2010. There is typically not much appetite for a third act. The Broadway opening is long gone and the disappointing ink long dry — the show is closing after a respectable number of performances, but without having recouped its investment. The national tour, put into motion even before the Broadway opening, has been out since early fall and is unlikely to be seen again by most Broadway taste-makers, new songs or not. In most similar circumstances, an original creative team of the caliber that came together for “The Addams Family” would have left the tour to associates, licked their open wounds with memories of their formidable past hits and moved on to the next high-profile project. But that's not what is happening here.

This whole team — producer Oken, director Zaks, composer Lippa, book writers Brickman and Elice — has shown up in New York not so much to argue that there is a third act, but that they have written a whole new third version: An Addams Family 3.0, with the unofficial opening slated for Chicago on Dec. 27. The show will arrive in the city of its birth belatedly because of a low demand for tickets (cutting a three-week stand at the Cadillac Palace Theatre down to one, a further reminder of the bittersweet nature of this quest), presumably because the bulk of the potential Chicago audience decided it had already seen it the first time and did not need to see it again.

Wrong, say the leading people who made it. Their baby is now quite different. And, they all insist, finally the show they really wanted in the first place. They are so passionately insistent on this point that they're willing to talk with uncommon frankness of the limitations of the show playing on Broadway for the next week or so.

To get to this point, the Addams crew has had to plow over some hurt feelings — their own.

“It was difficult to get past that at the outset,” Elice says, when asked how he felt as the New York reviews came in. “To be told that this was the worst musical of the past 40 years. Really? That vitriol was part of my energy for reinvestigating the show.”